"It's your last chance to see "Grisaille," a show that's cozily installed in a narrow townhouse and impeccably curated by Alison Gingeras. It features art rendered in infinite versions of the color gray or in close-toned monochrome palettes. John Currin's scruptious Boucher-like nude hung on a swath of randy nineteenth-century wallpaper excites. the walk-in sex shop that is Betty Tompkins's 1972 close-up depiction of intercouse, hanging across from Robert Morris's 1967 Uber-labial falling-felt sculpture in an all-pink room, tichked my fancy and made me sweat. The whole thing delights, top to bottom (at Luxembourg & Dayan through January 28)."

"This group show, curated with an elastic intelligence by Alison Gingeras, may focus on monotone art works but it's far from monotonous. Carnality reigns in Betty Tompkins's painting of a couple in flagrante delicto, lending a hard-core edge to the tumbling folds of Robert Morris's felt sculpture. a salon-style hanging in one room runds the gamut from an 1815 swatch of wallpaper to an ecstatic little crowd scene painted this year by Jeni spota. Minimalist canvases by Brice Marden and Agnes Martin strike a contemplative mood, which explodes in a devious installation in the bathroom by Bjarne Melgaard. Through Jan. 14. (Luxembourg & Dayan, 64 E. 77th St. 212 452 4646)."

New York artist, Betty Tompkins, has gained great critical international attention for her iconic series of large-scale photorealistic paintings, "The Fuck Paintings." Creating her works in the late 1960's and continuing to this day, her works are described as "explicit" but as others have noted, her works are honest contemporary feminist pieces.

...If there is an air of fire-sale finality to the show (and it is the last in Tom Morton’s year-long curatorship), there is also a sense that – like most neat, thematic constructs – the central idea of trust begins to unravel on prolonged exposure. Sub-themes of science fiction in Peter Newman’s elegant space-blanket mandala, ‘Metatron’s Cube’, and eroticism in a pair of hardcore paintings by Betty Tompkins, only succeed in muddying the already cloudy waters. However, the ping-ponging subject matters intrigue and make this quiet series of open-ended statements a fitting end to Morton’s occasionally subversive season at Cubitt. If anything, it proves that curators aren’t to be trusted either.

Among the highlights of the Biennale de Lyon 2003 were the large-format Fuck Paintings of the American artist Betty Tompkins, which were being shown in Europe for the first time, thirty years after they were painted. In her first interview Betty Tompkins speaks with Daniel Baumann about her work, her non-career and her late success.

You’d never believe it, but once there was a time when American licentiousness could shock the French. It’s 1973, and the New York-based Photo-Realist painter Betty Tompkins is sending two paintings across the Atlantic for exhibition in a Paris gallery. Collectively entitled the Fuck Paintings, they are based on surreptitiously obtained hardcore pornographic magazines, feature gynaecological close-ups of penetration, and are painted in an extraordinary and gorgeous monochromatic palette that makes the folds of skin around the participants’ genitalia looked like the buckled metal of a John Chamberlain crushed-car sculpture